New support material for program organizers: Evaluation report about edit-a-thons, and a pattern library[edit]

A new report about edit-a-thons includes data from 46 events between February 2012 and October 2013. It starts a series of seven reports about the most common types of programs executed by Wikimedia program leaders around the world, authored by the Wikimedia Foundation's Program Evaluation and Design team. This is the first time that such an analysis compares the outcomes of a specific program to its costs. Among the many findings of this report is that edit-a-thons with a small budget can be as productive as events with a large budget.

In the new learning pattern library on Meta, Wikimedians can share what they learn about organizing activities like edit-a-thons, GLAM collaborations, gender gap outreach, or Wiki Loves Monuments. Each pattern includes a description of a common problem, and instructions for solving it.

A new "Beta Features" section has been added to the user preferences menu, allowing logged-in editors to test upcoming software changes and give feedback to the developers, before these features become available for everyone.

Together with Red Hat, the Wikimedia Foundation's language engineering team organized the fall 2013 Open Source Language Summit in Pune, India. It was also attended by members of the VisualEditor and Mobile teams. Session topics included:

improving the support for fonts (in particular in Indic languages)

input methods for entering characters that are not available on a user's keyboard

a prototype for a user interface for translating Wikipedia articles and other content

OAuth extension makes it easier to use third-party editing tools[edit]

All Wikimedia wikis now supportOAuth, an open standard that allows users to authorize third-party software tools to carry out actions on the wiki on their behalf, without handing over their user password. Among the first tools that use this new feature is "CropTool", which allows users to crop images on Wikimedia Commons.

A visualization of the interaction between a third-party tool (left), the wiki and the user under the OAuth protocol

In November, the VisualEditor team continued to improve the stability and performance of this new editing interface, and add new features. The code was updated three times. Most of the team's focus was on fixing bugs, and on some major infrastructure changes, splitting out reusable code from VisualEditor to make it available to other teams. Much of the team travelled to the Open Source Language Summit in Pune, India to learn more about how to improve VisualEditor for a variety of languages, scripts, users and systems.

Thanks to two new members of the QA team, the automated browser tests have expanded in breadth and depth of coverage. Work continued on major new features like full rich copy-and-paste from external sources, a dialog for quickly adding citation templated references, and a tool to insert characters not available on users' keyboards. The editor was made available by default on just over 100 additional Wikipedias as part of the continuing roll-out. VisualEditor was also enabled for opt-in testing on Swedish Wiktionary and Wikimedia Sweden's wiki, the first time it has been available on a non-Wikipedia production wiki.

Work also continued on Parsoid, the parsing program that converts wikitext to annotated HTML to make VisualEditor work. Major changes were made to the specification and representation of elements. Due to bugs in external code used by the team, tests were added to catch similar issue automatically in the future. Editing support for categories was improved and several wikitext corruption issues were fixed. Work continued to test the performance of a system to store HTML and related information to improve performance of Parsoid.

In November, the Notifications feature was added to the German and Italian Wikipedias, completing the worldwide release of this tool. Community response to Notifications has been generally favorable on all wikis. While feature development has now ended for this project, we expect new notifications and features to be developed by other teams in coming months.

The Flow team finished the basic features of this new wiki discussion system. We made Flow work with the watchlist and added history view for boards, topics and posts. We asked for community feedback and testing, and prepared for release to production wikis in December by working on Operations and Security needs.

During the last month, the Wikipedia Zero team monitored the launch of Wikipedia Zero via text (USSD/SMS) in partnership with Airtel Kenya and Praekelt for the first pilot of the program. The team also continued to improve and simplify the process and files to configure Zero partners, enhanced performance and added safeguards to avoid previous issues.

The A/B test done by the Mobile web projects team resulted in an Edit Guider, now available on the mobile site. Other features like an interface overhaul and better user profiles are currently being tested in beta.

The fundraising team ran campaigns worldwide throughout November in preparation for the launch of the December campaign in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The team continued to run A/B tests of banner messages, designs, and payment flows. In the month of November, approximately USD 3.4 million was raised from 230,000 donors (preliminary numbers as donations are still settling). The team also sent email tests to past donors (nearly 300,000 emails have been sent so far this year). Please see the Fundraising 2013 page on Meta-wiki for additional information.

The WMF Merchandise Shop ran a 4-day banner campaign targeting logged-in users in the US from 11/12/13-11/15/13. We sold 124 items and had our most successful day in sales in the past 90 days. The campaign was educational in helping us strategize store improvements for 2014.

Six Letters of Intent for Round 2 2013-2014 were submitted. The Letter of Intent is the first stage of the proposal process, and is required in order to be able to submit a proposal. The eligibility process kicks off on December 15th, and all entities must close all gaps by February 15.

Prior to the FDC face-to-face deliberations, the FDC staff published its staff assessments of all of the Round 1 2013-2014 proposals. The staff assessments are one of many inputs into the FDC process; they were accompanied by e.g. a financial analysis (including a R1 2013-2014 Financial overview, program analysis, and a grant history and compliance analysis.

We've drafted a report based on analysis done by the Learning and Evaluation team in order to help us better understand the current state of the Participation Support Program. Ideas for growth and improvement are a particular focus of the report, which will be used to forward conversations with all stakeholders. We plan to iterate on our support offerings for Wikimedians to travel and participate in events in the coming months based on these findings and ongoing discussions.

Met with WMDE's Community Team to share learning and strategies for grantmaking to individuals. We hope to increase this sharing and coordination between these teams over the coming year.

Met with other WMDE staffers involved in research, Wikidata development, Teahouse and other community projects, in order to discuss specific IEG proposals and more general initiatives that may involve coordination between WMF and WMDE in the future.

Published a blog post sharing learning and insights from the conference.

Final reports have been received from the first 3 IEGrants and are under review:

Travel and Participation Support Program: program report in final stages, but survey questions are now available on Meta

Awareness and learning

Jessie co-presented at the Diversity Conference around Impact Assessment (see also the "Individual Engagement Grants" section above). Introduced people to the ideas of impact assessment and some tools for how to do it, as well as a case study for how to do so. Discussed in particular the Qualtrics, Wikimetrics, and Learning Pattern tools

6 volunteers participated in a Learning Patterns Hackathon on November 14, at which 6 new Learning Patterns were created. The library now contains 21 patterns.

The first of seven reports on the most common programs executed by Wikimedia program leaders around the world has been published on Meta (see also the general "Highlights" section, and below). It is the first time that an analysis on how the outcomes of a specific program compare to its costs is available. The report covers edit-a-thons and includes data gathered from 46 events completed between February 2012 and October 2013. The Program Evaluation and Design team asked the community for feedback and engaged in a discussion on how to further improve this and upcoming reports. The document is available on Meta: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Programs:Evaluation_portal/Library/Edit-a-thons

The U.S. and Canada education program officially transitioned from WMF to the Wiki Education Foundation, a new nonprofit that will run the Education Program in the United States and Canada. Jami Mathewson ended her contract with the Wikimedia Foundation and became an employee of the Wiki Education Foundation which also announced its search for an Executive Director. As quoted in a blog post published on the Wikimedia Foundation blog, University of Mississippi Professor Bob Cummings, board member of the Wiki Education Foundation, wrote “If we can help a generation of learners understand Wikipedia as contributors, they are more likely … to promote better cultural understanding of Wikipedia writ large. If we can train a generation of faculty to use Wikipedia productively in their teaching missions, we are then also preparing them to better understand the connections between specialized and public knowledge, and how their disciplines can play a role in improving the accuracy of information in Wikipedia.”

The team launched Wikipedia Zero with Tcell in Tajikistan and Beeline in Kazakhstan, bringing our total number of Wikipedia Zero countries to 22. Both operators issued press releases to announce the launch; Tcell also held a press conference, attended by two Wikipedians from Tajikistan.

The USSD/SMS pilot continued with Airtel Kenya. After some initial stability issues, the service seems to be running smoothly now. When Airtel sends promo SMS alerts, we get a good conversion rate and spike in usage. We are studying the data to identify ways to improve the user experience and validate the offering.

Carolynne Schloeder, Director of Mobile Programs, attended a press event organized by the local Wikimedia community in Dhaka, Bangladesh, followed by a wikimeetup. The press event was well attended and included brief presentations from each of our local mobile operator partners. Banglalink, an affiliate under group partner Vimpelcom and the first to launch Wikipedia Zero in Bangladesh, said the program is very well received by their subscribers. Grameenphone, a long time partner under our Telenor group agreement, spoke of promoting Wikipedia through their iGen educational program. A representative from Axiata operating company Robi also expressed interest in supporting Wikipedia Zero in the future. The event received substantial press coverage, which we hope will raise awareness of Wikipedia in Bangladesh and support the local Wikimedia community's efforts to increase the number of editors contributing to the Bengali version. Munir Hasan and the Wikimedia team in Bangladesh did an awesome job of organizing a very productive trip.

Carolynne also visited Jakarta where she met with Siska Doviana, Ivonne and John from Wikimedia Indonesia, and attended a wikimeetup organized by Ricky Setiawan. Siska also joined Carolynne in a meeting with our local parter Axiata XL. We have not seen much usage on zero.wikipedia.org on XL, so we explored ways that we could increase the benefits for Indonesia.

The Wikipedia Zero engineering team has coordinated with the Ops team to define certain IP ranges used for zero-rating. This is a key step needed to allow our partners to support HTTPS with Wikipedia Zero.

The U.S. and Canada program officially transitioned from WMF to the Wiki Education Foundation, a new nonprofit that will run the Education Program in the United States and Canada. Jami Mathewson ended her contract with the Wikimedia Foundation and became an employee of the Wiki Education Foundation. (see also the department highlights above)

Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager LiAnna Davis attended the Wikimedia Diversity Conference in Berlin, Germany, and discussed the education program's success in attracting new female contributors and being a way to fill content diversity gaps on Wikipedia.

The Wikipedia Education Program team has set up a new hub for planning the future of the software for supporting courses. We are now looking for feedback on what improvements users would like to see as development priorities. Developer Andrew Russell Green has created several key enhancements to the course pages – including the option for instructors to add sets of users as students, and to assign articles to students -- which we expect to deploy in the coming weeks.

Rod Dunican speaking at EduWiki 2013

Communications Contractor Sage Ross has begun exploring the use of GuidedTours to provide interactive elements to the Wikipedia Education Program on-wiki training modules, drawing on the work of Individual Engagement Grantee User:Ocaasi with The Wikipedia Adventure.

Rod Dunican, Director of Wikipedia Education Program, was a keynote speaker at EduWiki 2013 in Cardiff, Wales. Sponsored annually by Wikimedia UK, the EduWiki conference brings together educators and Wikimedians from around the world to discuss Wikipedia in education. Rod met with several lecturers, Wikimedians, and education program leaders, as well as members of the Wikimedia UK staff to discuss their educational programs and activities, goals, challenges, successes, and how the Global Education team could support their efforts.

Students, professors, and community members took part in a two-day Wikipedia training at King Saud University.

The first half of November was marked by significant travel, educational program meetings, and Wikipedia Education training sessions in the region by Arab World Education Program Manager, Tighe Flanagan.

Tighe Flanagan visited King Saud University to meet with program participants and assist in a two-day technical training for professors and students. 118 men and women took part in the training hosted at the Training Center for Wikipedia Translation at King Saud University in Riyadh. Dr. Nidal Yousef of Isra University also supported the training and shared his experience as a participant in the program in Jordan.

Tighe also visited the King Saud bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences to give a presentation on the Wikipedia Education Program and the importance of medical/health articles to approximately 30 students. This visit was arranged by an active local Wikipedian who is also a student at the university.

Tighe and Dr. Nidal Yousef met with leaders of the King Abdullah Project for General Education Development in Riyadh to share ideas on using Wikipedia as an education tool as they advise the Ministry of Education on improving curricula in the kingdom.

Tighe spent a week in Jordan meeting with previous program participants at Isra University as well as conducting outreach at universities that are new to the program this semester or may join in the coming semesters: Zarqa University, Princess Sumaya University for Technology. Tighe also had the opportunity to connect with a group of local Wikipedians to get direct feedback about the program in Jordan and to think of ways to better integrate the Wikipedians community with the efforst of the Wikipedia Education Program in the region.

The Education Extension is now fully translated into Arabic. An on-wiki discussion has been posted and a request has been filed on Bugzilla to enable it on the Arabic Wikipedia.

November was a busy month for the Program Evaluation and Design team. Communications wise it was rather quiet, as the team proceeded with parsing, processing, and evaluating data collected in the Data Collection Survey. Program Evaluation Specialist Dr. Jaime Anstee, along with interns Yuan Li and Edward Galvez, worked on processing and evaluating the data and on creating graphs and charts. This has been the major focus of November for us, as the goal to have some initial reporting available for the FDC. Highlights of the month include:

The ongoing development of program reports for seven of the most common programs executed by Wikimedia program leaders around the world.

When copyediting and reporting is complete, reporting has been published on Meta:

The first report on Meta was about edit-a-thons. Community Coordinator Sarah Stierch requested comments from the community about the report, the data, and its usability. Converations have been fruitful and the report has proceeded to be improved upon based on community response. These reports are continuosly being changed and improved upon, and we hope that the community will use it to learn from, and improve upon. You can view the edit-a-thon report here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Programs:Evaluation_portal/Library/Edit-a-thons

Frank Schulenburg presented the team's analysis of data for Edit-a-thons and Wiki Loves Monuments to the FDC during their recent visit to the Wikimedia Foundation. This allowed Frank to give the FDC a taste of the work the team has been doing and what its intended outcomes are.

The team continues to focus on these ongoing reports, with next steps including creating a tool/resource development timeline, and creating partnerships between chapters, affiliates and community members interested in piloting evaluation and design processes with support from the Program Evaluation and Design team.

Frank Schulenburg supported the Grantmaking team with an assessment of all Round 1 2013-2014 proposals from the programs perspective as one of the inputs into the FDC process.

Human Resources supported the logistics of the WMF board meeting and board retreat, transition team meetings, and the ongoing executive searches (namely, Executive Director, Chief Communications Officer, and VP of Engineering). HR also is overhauling the orientation process, continuing our testing of ergonomics evaluations, and conducting the annual employee engagement survey. We are also preparing for the annual holiday party. The new US 401k investment options will go live December 1st, as well as open enrollment for US benefits renewal, and the ongoing work of hiring and immigration support continues.

Luis Villa presenting about the version 4.0 of the Creative Commons licenses (slides)

On November 18, LCA announced the launch of a new community consultation regarding its new Trademark Policy draft. The consultation period is expected to last two months, ending on January 18. In creating this draft, LCA incorporated advice and feedback received from the community during an initial consultation about general trademark practices that lasted over five months. LCA focused on making the draft reflect community values, on ensuring easy reuse of the marks by community members, and on the design and readability of the policy draft. We look forward to hearing the community’s thoughts and feedback over the next two months, as we work towards finalizing the draft. Once finalized, the draft will be presented to the Board for adoption.

LCA welcomed its first legal fellow, Roshni Patel, a recent graduate from Georgetown Law who will be with the Foundation for 9 months and focusing on privacy issues during the term of her fellowship.

LCA welcomed a new legal counsel, Andrei Voinigescu, to the team. Immediately prior to joining WMF, he was living in Japan and working on intellectual property and corporate transactions for a large technology company. He previously interned at the Software Freedom Law Center and earned a degree in Computer Science from Queen's University in Ontario, Canada.

The Paid Advocacy Editing story continued into November. Our outside counsel sent a cease-and-desist letter to Wiki-PR which generated a fresh round of coverage, mostly positive. In other news, we reviewed the first round of candidates for the new Chief Communications Officer position at WMF and decided on 5 candidates to bring to San Francisco for the first round interviews in early December. The communications team provided on-going support to the Wikipedia Zero team’s announcement of new partnerships, and the LCA team’s launch of a community consultation period for the new Trademark Policy. We also helped Sue prep for her Reddit AMA.

The Rand Paul controversy and the MIT “Decline of Wikipedia” stories got extended play into the first week of November and then petered out.

The Wikimedia Foundation has sent a cease and desist letter to WikiPR demanding they stop violating Wikipedia's Terms of Use and that they comply with the conditions outlined in a ban from the site by the Wikipedia editing community.